A dog marked the start of a social media giant: Instagram

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have observed the rise of their idea. But what was in it that made the app so successful and how is it still growing?

It all began with a picture of a dog that was taken by Kevin Systrom who captured a stray dog around a taco stand in Mexico. That was the first image to be shared on the social platform on 6th October 2010 and, unsurprisingly, the caption was ‘test.’

Later, Systrom stated in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that if he had known that the picture was going to be the first one over Instagram, he would have certainly tried something better.

Till now, the picture has gathered over 93,000 likes and marks the beginning of an idea of two fellows, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, who met at Stanford University.

The founders of the app shared a keen interest in tech and photography and the platform was launched as a simple way to share edited and good looking pictures.

The idea was a quick success with app gathering more than a million users in first couple of months while the profiles started receiving followers in vast numbers. A few experts state that the timing of Instagram was perfect.

According to Dr Bernie Hogan, who has a research of more than 15 years on social media platforms, state that Instagram arrived when there were two things that weren’t put together very well. At one side, we had photo editing apps and on the other side there was social sharing. Facebook mobile wasn’t doing good and twitter lacked the way of sharing photos meaningfully. So, Instagram captured the right idea of enabling quick sharing of photos, giving users a chance to add great captions to it. Follow the way, big organizations started to buy instagram followers for their instant promotions.

Moreover, the app came when photography from phone was experiencing a huge rise and some early day phones weren’t good enough to capture pictures. So, the simple application of Instagram got a boost from that too.

As per the words of Jemima Gibbons, social media consultant in London, there were a lot of people who used smartphones but their cams weren’t good enough to go with the pictures. So, Instagram was the way to make those pictures look good, adding a unique element to your pictures and sharing it on the platform. The launch time was perfect too because broadband speed was on the rise and people got faster download and upload speeds.

The company is on the rise ever since, with more than 50 million users in first couple of years. It was bought in 2012 by Facebook for one billion dollars. In June, the app broke the landmark of 1 billion users.

Ever since its launch, the app continued to improve and new features were added to it on regular basis. The most notable change was the introduction of stories that allowed individuals to share temporary videos and photos on the platform. It was taken from its rival, snapchat.